OS X Lion 10.7 Internet Sharing with Raspberry Pi

We're thinking about Raspberry Pi, and one question is how you access the Raspberry Pi, if you don't have a screen / keyboard handy. There are various options, but one option is to connect to the Pi from another computer via ethernet (say a laptop). This requires your Pi and laptop to be on the same network. If you have a router handy, you can connect both to the router (e.g. your broadband router).

If you don't have a router handy, you can use internet sharing. Hwoever, in OS X Lion (10.7.5) there's a problem with the internet sharing. Let's say you have internet via WiFi, and you want to share that connection to the Pi via wired internet. It turns out that the macbook doesn't hand out an IP address to the Pi, i.e. DHCP somehow doesn't work, see e.g. [1].

So suppose you've got this setup:

Preferences > Sharing

Share your connection from: Wi-Fi

To computers using: (USB) Ethernet

(And enable "Service", "Internet Sharing", On)

Then in "Preferences > Network", under (USB) Ethernet, you see an IP address "169.254.x.x", which means that DHCP is somehow not working.